Young, handsome, and British- Ben Barnes has the world by its tail. As Dorian Gray, he shows the side of beauty and fame most people read about in gossip magazines. Delve with him into the psyche of a lost man.
“I read the book in my teens and I think for a lot of 
people it’s one of the first novels they read on their own. A lot of people read it because teachers think it’s forward thinking, exciting and shocking. Principally for me it’s always going to be the character in the context of the story. Getting this role was one of those massive challenges and it wasn’t going to get any greater than this”.
“I’ve loved playing the darker moments and I’ve really enjoyed playing the 46 year old Dorian. Obviously he looks the same so it’s been an interesting challenge to make him seem older and show the way experiences have affected him. It’s also very interesting to see how the other characters have responded to me on those days because they’ve often been aged in make-up - especially Colin Firth. On the days when I’ve been young and vulnerable he’s been bullying me on set; on the days when he’s made up to look 70 the tables are entirely turned and he feels a little bit vulnerable because he’s balding, so the joke is flipped! It’s very interesting to see people genuinely respond when you’re made up to look very different. Yesterday we filmed the very end and my portrait make-up and I morph into this disgusting, syphilitic, sinful mess of a man. I had three hours plus of prosthetics – even the producer couldn’t recognise me and the ADs couldn’t look me in the eye. It was very interesting to feel like a mutant and how powerful that was. It wasn’t so much the hideousness it was more the lack of responsiveness, the fact that they could only see my eyes, they couldn’t tell if I was smiling!”
“Working with Colin Firth so closely has been great. We filmed Easy Virtue together in 2008 and our characters didn’t really interact that much and it was a relatively unexplored relationship in the context of the story but in this we are the two protagonists. It’s just been a joy from start to finish, he’s just a great, great man, and very funny and very bright and worldly and I can’t praise him highly enough”.
“Olly Parker has half directed and half baby-sat me through this film. I felt a little bit sick at the beginning of every morning and I’d been looking at the script the night before and I’d be thinking ‘I don’t know how to make this believable or real’. But, I’d come in the next day and say to Olly ‘I’ve got a few ideas but basically I don’t know how to make this work, what do I do?’ Because Olly has been an actor it’s been really interesting watching him almost play
it through. Sometimes in the middle of a scene, he’ll come over and give me a note and as he walks off you can see him playing with it… kind of doing it himself, and that’s almost more useful for me. Even when you’re doing something and you’re very passionate about how it feels, that might not be coming through on screen. You have to take the word of the people who are watching the monitor. You’re probably not always the best judge of your own work”.
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Source: Momentum Pictures
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